Does trade liberalization discourage migration from poorer to richer countries?
In the longer term, yes, but economic analysis and historical evidence suggest a more nuanced view. International migration is the absentee in the current wave of globalization. Helped by falling communication and transportation costs and by the reduction in policy barriers to commodity and capital flows, trade flows and foreign direct investment have increased in the last 20 years at a faster rate than world production. Migration flows, on the other hand, have shown little change over the same period, excluding the temporary surge that followed the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. This contrasts sharply with previous integration episodes: in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and in the 1960s, international labour mobility played a central role in fostering economic integration. The changing stance towards migration policies goes a long way to explaining these trends. At the start of the last century, the attitude toward immigration was quite liberal. Similarly, in the 1960s,
